However, it was that dead woman doctor who set me free. As the weeks of dissection continued, the teams of students cut away the superficial muscles of their cadavers and reached the underlying bones. For convenience, each body was then divided into its constituent parts. The Nigerian dentist and I detached the woman’s arm from her thorax and stored the limb in one of the wooden chests at the end of the dissecting room.

Arriving one morning, I was surprised to find that she was without her head. I hunted the tables and at last found the head at the bottom of a storage cabinet. It lay among a dozen detached heads, the name tags of their students stitched through their ears. The advanced stages of dissection had pared away the skin of her face and the flaps of facial muscles, so that each muscle layer folded back like the page of a book. I held her head in my hands, looking into the eyes still set in the dissected orbit. Someone nudged my arm, and the book of her face fell open to reveal her hungry bones and notched teeth, warning me away.

The doctor demonstrating the female urino-genital system asked the students at our table to detach the remaining arm and legs, and soon only the thorax and abdomen remained. The womb, fallopian tubes, and pelvic basin were displayed like a miniature stage set, a boudoir framed by the curtains of the abdominal muscles. The unneeded blood vessels and nervous tissue were discarded into a scrap pail. I tied together her shoulder blade and arm bones, and attached my name to her identification tag. I held her dissected hand, whose nerves and tendons I had teased into the light. Its layers of skin and muscle resembled a deck of cards that she waited to deal across the table to me.

On the last day of term she had gone. The tables were cleared, and the assistants polished the glass tops. When we returned after Christmas a new set of cadavers would lie under the overlit ceiling, and we would begin the dissection of a second body part.

Searching for a scalpel I had mislaid, I stepped into the preparation room, where the chief assistant was tying together the bones of each cadaver. Later they would be individually cremated or interred. Little more than clutches of gristle and joint, they lay on the workbenches like the remains of so many Sunday roasts.

I scanned the benches and recognised a familiar hand tied with a stout string to her ribs and hip bones. Together, they made up a parcel that might have slipped into a small suitcase. I read the name tag: Dr. Elizabeth Grant. This dead physician had not only offered her body for dissection but had reduced herself to a heap of fatty sticks, as if deliberately dissolving whatever power she held over me.